What's the Problem

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Local files gave us full ownership; the cloud trades that ownership for convenience.
The bargain isn’t as good as it looks.

The computer file was born in the 1960s, when men wore narrow ties and computers were the size of small houses. These machines needed a way to remember things, so programmers invented files- digital containers that keep information safe and organized.

At first, files lived on magnetic tape, which unwound with a whir and could seize up at the worst moment. Later came disk drives, which were better because you no longer had to scroll past everything just to reach the part you wanted.

By the 1970s, regular people could own computers, which was like giving everyone their own printing press or their own fishing boat. The personal computer made every man a captain of his own digital vessel. You could create files, name them whatever you pleased- even something as ridiculous as my-novel-that-will-make-me-rich.txt and store them wherever you wanted.

You owned these files the way you owned your socks or your opinions about ikea furniture. If you wanted to copy a file seventeen times and put it in seventeen different folders, nobody could stop you. This was complete freedom, applied to ones and zeros.

The file system was honest work. It did not lie to you or pretend to be something it wasn't. When you saved a document to your C: drive, it went to your C: drive, not to some mysterious place in the sky where strangers can read it. You could work on your files during a thunderstorm, a power outage, or while camping in the woods where the only connection was to nature. The files were yours, like a good pair of boots or a reliable dog.

Now your documents live in "the cloud," which sounds poetic but is really just someone else's computer in a warehouse in Virginia. You can access your files anywhere, they say, as long as you have internet, which is like being able to fish anywhere as long as you bring the entire lake with you.

The cloud companies promise to keep your data safe, but here are few reasons why this might not be the case:

What can I do, you might ask? Here are a few solutions.